A Special Xbox Character Could Be Coming To Mortal Kombat [Rumor]

Having platform specific characters for a fighting game is something that never really goes over well with gamers. In some cases having character x appear on one console and not the other will lead to further fanboy battles and an audience that is slightly ticked off that they’re not receiving an additional combatant to master and own fools with online. The upcoming Mortal Kombat game has an exclusive character for the PS3 version in the form of Kratos – who at this point is the mascot for the PlayStation brand. Gamers who are looking to pick up Mortal Kombat on the Xbox 360 have nothing as of now in the way of a bonus character which has led them quite bitter and somewhat annoyed.

According to someone who’s in the know, there will be a soon-to-be announced Xbox 360 exclusive character in Mortal Kombat. According to the source, MK developer NetherRealm Studios apparently approached Microsoft some months ago but weren’t too keen on the idea. Microsoft soon changed their mind on the prospect of an exclusive character in Mortal Kombat once they saw the reaction and hype gamers had once Kratos was announced to be in Mortal Kombat last month. So yes, there will be an exclusive character appearing in the Xbox 360 version of everyone’s favorite bloody fighting game.

As to whom the Xbox 360 combatant is remains a mystery but it definitely won’t be Master Chief from Halo as Microsoft said that was off limits. I guess Microsoft didn’t like the idea of seeing Master Chief bash someone’s skull or potentially get his head & spine removed from his body. Other characters from Halo were rumored to still be an option, but are likely not to appear due to animation and design issues.

Besides Master Chief the other likely choice to appear in Mortal Kombat was everyone’s favorite grim dudebro Marcus Fenix from Gears of War. Marcus would be a good match in MK from a thematic standpoint, but according to the source (who has close ties to a NetherRealm employee) the development team deemed Marcus to be too slow to put in the game and didn’t want to speed up his style to the point where it looked comical.

So with Master Chief and Marcus Fenix being a no-go that leaves the remaining options somewhat limited. Microsoft doesn’t have much in the way of big character driven 1st party games, so outside of throwing Alan Wake into the mix, which would be silly, I really can’t think of any immediate options unless Microsoft would approach a very friendly 3rd party publisher and ask for permission to use that character. Or maybe Microsoft and NetherRealm will go old-school and quasi resurrect Killer Instinct by having a character from that game pop up in MK. Killer Instinct was developed by Rare back in the day and as many of you know, Rare has now been relegated to working on Avatar and Kinect projects, much to the disdain of those who work there.

The announcement of the Xbox 360 exclusive character for MK should be announced shortly since the game is slated to be released on April 19th. According to the source, the 360 exclusive character will be made available as free DLC as NetherRealm was too far along in production to include on the actual disc, so we’re getting day 1 DLC for better or worse.

There’s absolutely no other hints regarding who the Xbox 360 exclusive character will be, so does anyone have any thoughts or prolonged theories on who it could be? And is anyone worried that the team at NetherRealm may not have had the same amount of time to polish and design the Xbox exclusive character compared to the rest of the combatants in the game?